THE YEAR 1909
This will boggle your mind, I know it did mine! The year is 1909. One hundred years ago. What a difference a century makes! Here are some statistics for the Year 1909 :
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The average life expectancy was 47 years.
Only 14 percent of the homes had a bathtub.
Only 8 percent of the homes had a telephone.
There were only 8,000 cars and only 144 miles
Of paved roads.
The maximum speed limit in most cities was 10 mph.
The tallest structure in the world was the Eiffel Tower !
The average wage in 1909 was 22 cents per hour.
The average worker made between $200 and $400 per year .
A competent accountant could expect to earn $2000 per year, A dentist $2,500 per year, a veterinarian between $1,500 and $4,000 per year, and a mechanical engineer about $5,000 per year.
More than 95 percent of all births took place at HOME .
Ninety percent of all doctors had NO COLLEGE EDUCATION!
Instead, they attended so-called medical schools, many of which
Were condemned in the press AND the government as 'substandard. '
Sugar cost four cents a pound.
Eggs were fourteen cents a dozen.
Coffee was fifteen cents a pound.
Most women only washed their hair once a month, and used
Borax or egg yolks for shampoo.
Canada passed a law that prohibited poor people from
Entering into their country for any reason.
Five leading causes of death were:
1. Pneumonia and influenza 2. Tuberculosis 3. Diarrhea 4. Heart disease 5. Stroke
The American flag had 45 stars.
The population of Las Vegas , Nevada , was only 30!!!!
Crossword puzzles, canned beer, and ice tea
Hadn't been invented yet.
There was no Mother's Day or Father's Day.
Two out of every 10 adults couldn't read or write.
Only 6 percent of all Americans had graduated from high school.
Marijuana, heroin, and morphine were all available over the counter at the local corner drugstores. Back then pharmacists said, 'Heroin clears the complexion, gives buoyancy to the mind,regulates the stomach and bowels, and is, in fact, a perfect guardian of health'
( Shocking? DUH! )
Eighteen percent of households had at least
One full-time servant or domestic help.
There were about 230 reported murders in the ENTIRE ! U.S.A. !
(Mainly becasue there was a firearm of some sort in almost every home! An armed society is a POLITE society!!)
I am now going to forward this to someone else without typing it myself. From there, it will be sent to others all over the WORLD - all in a matter of seconds!
Try to imagine what it may be like in another 100 years.

Less than $3 billion in national debt (07/01/1909 • 2,639,546,241.04) versus well over 11 trillion at this time. Let's compare those two numbers: 3,000,000,000 vs. 11,000,000,000,000. You would have to multiply $3 billion 3,667 times to reach 11 trillion!! Assuming a population of 300,000,000 million people in this country, that amounts to about $37,000 dollars EACH!!

Our debt combined with future obligations in in 1909 was still under $3 billion dollars being how Social Security and Medicare had not yet been created. In 2008, that number was approxiamately $55 trillion!!! That is roughly 1/5 of WORLD GDP!!!

Inflation averaged 1.35% for FY 1914, versus 3.85% for FY 2008.

The Federal Reserve Bank had not yet been created and we were still on the Gold Standard.

Gold closed the year at $20.67 per ounce in 1909 versus $869.75 in 2008. This is a true indicator of just how much our dollar has been devalued over the past 100 years as one ounce of gold is still one ounce of gold. It just takes about 4100% more dollars to buy that same ounce.

The thing you have to remember about the so called life expectancy figures you read about is that they are very misleading. Those numbers are highly skewed by the numbers of infants that died during childbirth in those days or infants and very young children who died of diseases and illnesses that have largely been eradicated or are easily cured now. It's not like you would walk down a street in 1909 and hardly see anyone in their 50's, 60's 70's or even 80's. Certainly not as many people survived into their 80's and beyond as now, but I don't think there were that many people just under 50 on their deathbeds either.

Ain't that the truth... a little different and maybe a whole lot simpler.

I had the privilege of knowing my great-grandmother as I grew up. She was born in 1890, and while she would never claim her life was anything special, she saw some of the major milestones in human history:
- the motorcar (she remembered her first ride in one)
- powered flight (she met the Wright Bros. when they landed near the school she was teaching at)
- what we consider modern medicine and vaccinations
- women's suffrage
- space travel and men on the moon
- two world wars
- a couple recessions/depressions
- radio
- television

And quite a few more...

She passed away in 1995 at the age of 104; I was 15... I wish now that I'd spent more time with her. She always had some really great stories.

I can't believe that in 1909, in an age of city ice deliveries and when a good many farmsteads had their own ice houses, that no one had figured out how to chip ice off a block and drop it in a glass of tea. My maternal grandparents (both born 1889) and great-grand-parents (grandma was born 1869) spoke of iced tea as if they had been making and drinking it since childhood.

I'm not so certain the mortality rates were all that skewed because of infant mortality. A good many women died in childbirth. And in those days, tetanus often was fatal, as were TB and any number of childhood and adult diseases. FWIW, diarrhea is still among the top five causes of death world-wide.

OTOH, it took a long, long time for some things to change. My father-in-law began working in a drug store when he was 13, in 1927. His first job was washing medicine bottles for re-use -- washing 'em in a wooden sink, no less. I can't help thinking the druggist's cure may have sometimes been fatal!

It also took a long time for indoor plumbing to be universal in the US. In 1950, there were still more outdoor privies than indoor toilets. My family lived on a dirt road on the rural outskirts of Des Moines until we moved west in 1955; we had an outdoor privy until we moved. But no big deal; so did everyone else I knew.

I though it was actually ice cream cones that showed up at the 1904 Wold's Fair, when an ice cream vendor ran out of cups, got fresh waffles from another vendor, rolled 'em into cones, dumped ice cream on top...and the idea caught on, big-time!